Should we revert to considering animal products a bit of a treat? Photograph: Getty

You can't open the papers or turn on the telly these days without hearing about climate change, and the dangers it poses. Most of us know more or less where the problem areas lie - we drive too much, fly too much, buy too many electrical goods and turn our thermostats too high.

And some of us may make a vague connection between food and climate changing emissions, in an "it's all about flying things halfway round the world" sort of way. But the contribution that our food system makes to climate changing emissions is about much more than food miles.

As a story in Sunday's Observer shows, there are impacts along the whole of the food chain - from growing the food, processing, packaging and refrigerating it, to retailing it (all those chiller cabinets, for instance). In its entirety, the food we eat contributes to about a fifth of the UK's climate changing emissions. Food transport contributes only a fraction of this.

Almost half our food related emissions result directly from rearing animals for the meat and dairy products that form such a staple part of the British diet. Burping cows and sheep emit methane while all livestock cause nitrous oxide gases; both these gases have a far more powerful greenhouse gas effect than carbon dioxide.

So rather than worrying about how far our carrots have travelled, it's far more important to think about how much cheese, meat and milk we actually consume, and trying to cut down.

This is not to say that we should all go vegan. Livestock farming has its upsides too. Grazing sheep and cattle help maintain biodiversity of our uplands and are an intrinsic part of the rural landscape that we know and value.

But we do need to cut down fairly dramatically on the numbers we rear and how much we eat - and that means rethinking the place that these foods have in our diet.

We need to start valuing meat and dairy products once again as celebration foods, or as flavourings (bits of bacon in soup). We need to rediscover the joys of offal rather than turning edible meat into pet food or incinerating it.

And it would help if we actually ate all of the stuff we buy - put together, meat and dairy foods together account for more food waste than any other food category. Which, in a sense, is a 'waste' of all the greenhouse gases that were emitted during the course of rearing that now discarded animal.

In short - we need to eat fewer meat and dairy products (and, if farmers are to survive, pay more for them) and use the whole of the animal when we do. Offal scoffing might be back in vogue but will it ever become mainstream? And as for reducing our intake of animal products as a whole, the question remains: is that something that most of us could commit to?